Theravada Buddhism Many Theravada sources refer to the Pāli language as Magadhan or the language of Magadha. This identification first appears in the commentaries, and may have been an attempt by Buddhists to associate themselves more closely with the Mauryans. The Buddha taught in Magadha, but the four most important places in his life are all outside of it. It is likely that he taught in several closely related dialects of Middle Indo-Aryan, which had a high degree of mutual intelligibility. There is no attested dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan with all the features of Pāli. Pāli has some commonalities with both the Ashokan inscriptions at Girnar in the West of India, and at Hathigumpha, Bhubaneswar, Orissa in the East. Similarities to the Western inscription may be misleading, because the inscription suggests that the Ashokan scribe may not have translated the material he received from Magadha into the vernacular of the people there. Whatever the relationship of the Buddhas speech to Pāli, the Canon was eventually transcribed and preserved entirely in it, while the commentarial tradition that accompanied it (according to the information provided by Buddhaghosa) was translated into Sinhalese and preserved in local languages for several generations. In Sri Lanka, Pāli is thought to have entered into a period of decline ending around the 4th or 5th century (as Sanskrit rose in prominence, and simultaneously, as Buddhisms adherents became a smaller portion of the subcontinent), but ultimately survived. The work of Buddhaghosa was largely responsible for its reemergence as an important scholarly language in Buddhist thought. The Visuddhimagga, and the other commentaries that Buddhaghosa compiled, codified and condensed the Sinhalese commentarial tradition that had been preserved and expanded in Sri Lanka since the 3rd century BCE.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 08:19:39 +0000
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